A LexisNexis Blog

CFTC Speeches Boring? Not if They’re From Bart

“One day in early August 1977, at 1:15 in the morning, Elvis—“the King”—arrived with some guests at “Libertyland,” the amusement park in Memphis, Tennessee, wearing a blue jumpsuit. He wore a black leather belt with a ginormous turquoise-studded buckle. The King had rented Libertyland until 7 in the morning. While he was there, he repeatedly rode the Zippin Pippin—Libertyland’s roller coaster, and lost his buckle. That was the last time anyone saw Elvis in public. He died eight days later on August 16th.”

In fact, to judge by the transcripts of his speeches — to say nothing of his flowing locks, square jaw, and bronzed complexion — CFTC Commissioner Bart Chiltonis a lot more like a Ryan Secrest than we’re liable to expect from the head of a major federal regulatory agency. And the speeches themselves — well, they’re a lot closer to being like the Zippin Pippin than we’re accustomed to when listening to a government talking head hunched over the lectern.

Sometimes extended and explicit, sometimes fleeting and oblique (the David Bowie allusion consists merely of Chilton’s deliberate stutter on a word: “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes”) — these references are often more than mere window dressing. They can also serve a rhetorical function in that they allow Chilton to connect with his audience, to establish what Aristotle called ethos — here, his persona as a regular human being talking to other human beings. Of course, they also allow him to counterbalance the arid abstraction of topics like the regulation of derivatives and the proposed establishment of swap data repositories. And they give him a way of framing or illustrating these abstract concepts with images that are concrete and familiar, and thus more comprehensible.